Indulgent as this blog may be with solitary insights, its
informal aim has been to stick to the Washington scene, to match the implication of this increasingly
comical title “DC Arts Beat” (nowadays manifesting the tempo of a dirge). Yet I’m anxious to break ranks here by
invitation of this wonderful rhymed couplet that typifies the masterful poetry
of Alice Goodman’s libretto for Nixon in
China:

This
air agrees with me
Wish we could send some to D.C.

The text, which coincides with the feeling I get every time
(these days almost monthly) I visit New York City, is for Richard Nixon after he
steps off a staircase that descends from a campy setpiece drop depicting Air
Force One. He has landed in China for
his historic visit of 1972, but for the past couple of weeks at the
Metropolitan Opera House, he actually has been tenor James Maddalena reprising
a role he created almost a quarter century ago.

Among other questions we ask of contemporary opera – quite often, “where
is the damned melody?” – there is a prescient one after the test of time, to
ask whether a work deserves a place in the so-called operatic canon of company
repertoires. Mind you, most premieres
never get a subsequent run, especially after decades of wide neglect. The reasons for this range from artistic
leadership (lately reversed in Peter Gelb’s commitment to operas by living
composers, not-so-much-here), to outright rejection.
Much of the latter has been deserved, against the pens of “boomers”
who had graduated from the Second Viennese School of tone-row terrorists dominating conservatories for decades and only recently begun to be outdated by
tonal successors. If you care to think
about how punk rock gave the middle finger to flower children, imagine that
Minimalism as an artistic movement similarly flamed against the structural
fraud of its forebears with punishing simplicity. Two founders from that movement have earned
permanence: Philip Glass and John
Adams. Both are being revived at
America’s opera mecca, the Met, some decades after their emergences: respectively, in Satyagraha and Nixon in China.

As we know from his recent Washington residency, John Adams
falls into that great tradition of master composers doubling as maestro
conductors. Saturday evening, I took
pilgrimage to New York for this premiere of Nixon
in China upon the Met stage, with Adams at the podium. I had experienced the birth of this work over
two decades ago as a relative kid in Los Angeles, hearing fellow surf punk Kent
Nagano conduct the original production in the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion. It left an immediate and overwhelming
impression back then: it dared to be a
work of intellectual tableaux on recent events, within an art form that
typically finds us suppressing giggles during, say, Rigoletto when that almost-dead daughter revives from her bodybag for
one last aria and sings to the back row of the rafters. Nixon
in China also mashed up the patent repetitive style of Philip Glass’
familiar Minimalism/Maximalism with a kind of nostalgic nod to mid-century Big
Band, a recurrent style in Adams that he has called his “trickster persona.” Between those poles, though, the opera is solidly
classical in creds: Adams, surpassing
the skills of his Minimalist contemporaries who thrived best in self-serving chamber
ensembles, always possessed the Western skill of a master orchestrator, on the
level that we know well of, say, Rimsky-Korsakov to Mussorgsky. (One fine example is Adams' orchestration of American
folk songs by Charles Ives.) Indeed,
a pinnacle musical moment arises from Nixon's ballet-within-the-opera, after a passing thunderstorm, that anyone
familiar with the score anticipates for its epic beauty. Around all the surrounding trickster
Minimalism, one swears that Wagner’s spirit is haunting the score. While I'm guilty here of hyperbole, it is absolutely
defensible to suggest that this moment is among the greatest in 20th Century opera – yet, at the same time, it is played for laughs. Despite being a political meditation
injected with such smart debate, Nixon is at
heart a hoot of an opera. Saturday,
it seemed that some of the humor was lost on the audience, but when Chou En-lai
proposes a toast with eloquent poetic ruminations – only to be met with Tricky
Dick saying in turn, “Never have I so enjoyed a dinner…outside America!” – we
are brought to the same embarrassed laughter as recently we found in our 41st
President.

Indeed, there is a masterful scene early in the opera that for me had
always stood above the rest, exemplifying the way that Nixon manages to arouse good comedy and
drama out of a physically static philosophical debate. Seated in front of a not ironically
minimalist bookshelf setpiece, Nixon and Mao Tse-tung debate Capitalism against
Communism to the musical accompaniment of faux-clumsy, persistent syncopation,
and a sort of Greek/Communist chorus in Mao’s trio of assistants.

Founders come first
Then the profiteers.

It is during this scene that anyone experiencing this
quarter-century revival begins to think about the China we thought we knew, and
now the presumed dominance of Capitalist China that awaits us.

All said, for its surprising success as a work of theatre, Nixon always suffered a bit during its
latter half. There is a
ballet-within-the-opera, brilliantly choreographed by Mark Morris, that nears
incomprehensibility when a horny Henry Kissinger camps it up, inciting soldiers
to whip a peasant girl to death. Literally
(I believe), audiences reach a point when they are forced to ask, “What the hell is
going on?” (I had pondered a few months ago that the film Mao's Last Dancer smartly depicted this agit-prop art form in an ironically beautiful fulfillment of Madame Mao's perverse vision.) And then there is the final
Act III, which contrasts heavily against the preceding political theatre with
its intimate and theatricalistic juxtaposition of the principals settling into
bed and ruminating what’s-the-point-of-it-all.
Much of this is Peter Sellars’ doing, an offstage eccentric evangelist
for the arts and, less successfully on the job, a scenarist who has a
reputation for quite honestly ruining good pieces. Adams’ subsequent opera The Death of Klinghoffer is a fine example, where the score and
narrative were ever more brilliant, but Sellars staged it using puzzlingly
dense scaffolding that was more Hollywood Squares than ambitious experimental
theatre. Indeed, documentary filmmaker
Penny Woolcock transformed Klinghoffer
through her masterful film version; and for Adams’ next opera Doctor Atomic, she was called upon to get
it right for the Met debut after Sellars did his thing for the world premiere
in San Francisco.

The larger fact, though, is that Nixon in China represents the apex of the operatic repertory from
the latter half of the 20th Century.
Rather like the surprising irony of Nixon’s legacy itself, the opera has
aged well. Importantly, too, Nixon functions as an artfully historical record
of two countries meeting, believed now to be vying for dominance through
ever-increasing battles of political, financial and intellectual capital. And musically, Nixon represents a precious moment in the development of Adams' idiomatic style, when he was a deliberate Minimalist composer pushing that form's infant boundaries with distinctly American assimilation less obvious than the workings of forebears like Aaron Copland or Leonard Bernstein. There was a moment that I'll never forget, at the end of Act II's raucous wail, "I Am the Wife of Mao Tse-tung," when Adams led the orchestra into his thunderous cadence and confronted the ensuing aural decay with an expression of sheer awe at what he had created. Upon this, the lights faded into darkness – and that is an image, of this great artist humbled by his art, burned into my memory forever.

"I Am Old and Cannot Sleep" (Russell Braun as Chou En-lai), that concludes the opera